Sponsored post: Flash is not one size fits all

There is no question that flash is a disruptive technology. The performance it offers, coupled with intelligent data-management capabilities, means the difference between thriving and diving for businesses. In financial services, for example, flash permanently transforms the speed of business by making real time an expectation.

However, many flash vendors today emphasize speed only. They are not focused on the needs of customers and what is actually appropriate for their business. Although there will always be products to serve use cases in which performance matters most, customers don’t want to sacrifice the operational compatibility and data-management features they trust for performance with a specialized architecture.

Customers want to maximize the value of flash across the entire compute, network and storage stack. They also want, at the end of the day, seamless access to their data and applications across private and/or public clouds.

Because every application workload is different, our customers tell us that they don’t want one-size-fits-all flash-storage approaches. As a result, NetApp’s broad portfolio includes both hybrid and all-flash storage offerings.

The battle between mainstream storage players and flash startups will continue. Only those that enable customers to achieve seamless and nondisruptive mobility of their data, deploy the right amount of flash, and have optimal performance, reliability and scalability for their specific needs will win. One-size-fits-all portfolios won’t help customers navigate the IT transitions they face today.